I wrote a couple days ago about how I do not really care for all my year-in-review things that have been cropping up all over the place since they mostly just remind me of the incredibly varied and emotionally draining year I’ve had (and I’ve had more of these things crop up since then that just further cemented this unfortunate pattern), but I wanted to take some time to end the year on a more positive note. I spent all year writing about my struggles and what made the year difficult, often in broad strokes that brushed aside all the positive stuff that actually happened, so I wanted to take some time to paint my year in review by connecting all the bright spots in a way I rarely take the time to do. It is, after all, so much easier to be miserable. Still, I think it’s work worth doing before I wrap up 2023 (well, aside from one last piece of Flash Fiction that will be posting tomorrow) and maybe it will help lift my mood as I prepare myself for whatever heaven or hell 2024 will bring.
Continue readingMusing
Practical By Necessity
The other day, as my team at work was eating our traditional holiday Qdoba lunch, our boss asked was what we were planning to get ourselves for Christmas (at 32, I’m the youngest person in the group, so this is mostly adults with grown children or older adults without children with two other exceptions beside myself). We bandied back and forth a bit, talking about upgrades to home theater systems, parts for a boat someone is building, good suppliers for smart home appliances or gear until the conversation began to stymie and I tossed out my answer. Since my PC is about eight years old and can’t play more and more modern games (the latest updates to Cyberpunk2077 upgraded it out from underneath my ability to play it), I’ve been saving up for a new high-powered gaming computer and will just be tossing a bit of money that way rather than buying myself anything specific. One of my coworkers joked about Gamer LEDs, water cooling systems, and overclocking computers but, once we’d gotten all the jokes out, I said I was planning to buy a computer strong enough that I wouldn’t need to overclock it for the stuff I wanted to do since I could just save a bit longer and not potentially shorten the lifespan of my computer by putting too much stress on it. My boss commented that I’m so practical, which was probably just an offhand comment in his mind, but it’s been stuck in my mind ever since.
Continue readingA Warm Start To Winter
Aside from a two-day period of low temperatures, high winds, and biting cold (it was so windy on one of those days that I was almost knocked over by a particularly vicious gust and I’m difficult to even stagger, let alone topple), it has been a fairly mild December so far. Most days, the temperature spends a decent chunk of the day above freezing, there’s some sunlight, and my wall AC/Heater unit is enough to keep my apartment comfortable against the chill. Sure, we’ve had an oddly rainy and grey parcel of days lately, with occasional periods of snow sprinkled in for flavor, but it’s been kind of nice, especially compared to last year. Last year, it was so windy and cold that it permanently damaged the aircraft transportation network in the US (and almost made me miss my trip to Spain due to the cascading ripples of the week that so many flights were cancelled rather than rescheduled). This chilly, wet, and sunless weather might not be welcome, but it sure beats the pants off how awful last it was this time last year. I actually had to buy firewood and go through my plans for what to do if I lost power because I’m pretty sure my apartment would have frozen if I’d lost my ability to heat it against that drafty cold. So I can put up with this, even if I’d probably be better insulated against the cold and wind in my current apartment than I ever could have been in my previous one.
Continue readingThis Might Be The Burnout Talking, But I’m Incredibly Frustrated With Stuff At Work
Today (specifically the day I’m writing this, not the day you’re reading this), I’m whiling away my afternoon as I mostly just keep plates spinning at work. We’re rapidly approaching the holiday season and not a lot is getting done since the office will be closed a week from now. It’ll only be closed for the holidays for a few work days, but that’s already more than we usually get, so everyone’s really feeling a proglonged version of the “friday afternoon” complaceny that tends to hit the office. No one expects much to happen and those of us who are still trying to get things done are pretty much out of luck. So, instead of getting anything done that I had planned to do today (since some of the stuff I needed to do any of that work is officially eight days past due), I’m just trying to keep people from forgetting stuff that I need them to do. It’s boring work, comprised of a lot of writing down lists and looking through my emails and chat messages for the latest updates, but it’s pretty much all I can do right now that is still going to help me complete all my high-priority work before the holidays. Hopefully, anyway. I’m only in the office for four days next week and then I’ll be gone from the office for twelve (total days, not work days, unfortunately), so my window to get anything done before 2024 rolls around is rapidly shrinking [and has officially closed, thanks to holiday delays stretching from US Thanksgiving to the beginning of 2024, so none of that stuff will actually get done this year].
Continue readingUnpacking The Past
Recently, my younger sibling (the middlest of us middle siblings) brought me the last of my things from my parents’ house. A lot of it was model train stuff that used to belong to my dad and that now belongs to me for reasons I don’t remember (I probably said I’d take it when he mentioned planning to throw it out sometime a decade or so ago), but this delivery also included a bunch of the seasonal decorations that had been given to me in my childhood and all of my “baby books” as my family called them (pretty much anything for kindergardeners and younger). I had a pretty impressive collection (all of us did), but I think I might have held onto mine the best. I was always the kid most interested in building my book collection. I reread things the most. I enjoyed having them since, with one exception, books were never forbidden to me in a household where every other piece of media I ever acquired had to be vetted by my parents to make sure it was appropriate for me. Which is funny, since books wound up being some of the most subversive stuff I ecountered as a kid in a lot of ways, some of which weren’t always terribly constructive or thought-provoking. I mean, I remember tearing pages out of my Dragon Ball manga because some of the art showed a woman’s breasts and I knew I’d lose all access to manga (which had somehow fallen under the blanket approval of books in my parents’ minds) just as well as I remember how Fullmetal Alchemist taught me to be more critical of authority. Or how Tuck Everlasting taught me that maybe endless anything wasn’t actually something I should desire (which laid the groundwork for me questioning the faith I was raised to accept without thought) and how Hatchett taught me how to start fires without matches.
Continue readingViolence As A Vehicle For Progression In Video Games
Over the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the place of violence in video games. Pretty much every game I’ve played this year requires some degree of violence in order to make forward progress. In my beloved RPGs, it is the central pillar of almost every game. Sure, there’s usually a story and some excellent character work, but almost the whole thing still revolves around violence. My favorite RPG from the past year, Chained Echoes, features combat as the main mechanic of moving around the world and the method of resolving every bit of story tension in the game (even if the story isn’t really about violence and is actually critical of how “the ends justify the means” style philosophies are almost always an excuse for power getting what it wants through violence). Perhaps the biggest game of the year, Baldur’s Gate 3, is incredibly violent, sometimes moreso than others because there are entirely legitimate, if digustingly evil, paths through the game that involve indiscriminate murder. Sure, both these games involve violence against monsters and people with little to distinguish the two groups from each other (and next-to-nothing to explicitly point out that maybe you’re the greatest monster of them all, in the case of Baldur’s Gate 3), but games with violence exclusively against monsters aren’t much better since they still require violence in order to progress the game. Even one of the cutest, most-delightful games I’ve played (Lil Gator Game) involved violence, albeit violence against cardboard “monsters” rather than against other people. There’s almost no escaping it, which is unfortunate because one of the things that drives my escapist desires the most these days is the amount of violence in the world.
Continue readingSensible Precautions In A Wisconsin Winter
It is snowing as I write this. It is not the first snow of the season–that came after Thanksgiving, falling after midnight in a powdery coating that lingered for days, even through warmth and sunlight that should have sent it away. It is the first snowfall that happened during what could generously be called daylight hours, though. A light, gentle dusting that will stick mostly to the snow left over from a week ago as the brined, salted, sanded, or grit-covered roads force whatever lands there to vanish swiftly. There will be more snow, soon, at least according to the forecast, and we have reached the time of year where it will likely stick until we get another mid-winter heatwave of temperatures in the fifties [which has already happened]. Snow in a brown winter can be a deceptive thing, lingering longer than you would think as the regional draughts isolate it so long that it has no choice for survival but to hide in unseen corners and mix with dirt until the muddy slush it becomes is finally melted down by the weight of its disguise. It can last weeks, maybe even months if its cold enough, but people who desire some semblance of the frosted winters they recall from years past will often seek it out and, like a flower plucked for a vase, bring a swift end to something that might have lived longer on its own.
Continue readingReflections In Post-Holiday Silence
After just over three full days of hosting (about seventy-three hours), my siblings have left and I am alone in my apartment except for the occasional quiet cheeps of my bird, Fidget, who is both missing the noise and attention of the last few days but also relieved that there are far fewer humans wandering around in her view. Which is, in its own way, a little bit like how I feel. While I am much more relieved to have the silence than I am missing the noise and attention, I do miss it a little bit. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t nice to have people around all the time. Incredibly exhausting, but nice. Nice to say good night to people as they went off to their beds and nice to know there would be people around when I woke up. Sure, the only time to myself I got during that whole three day period was either bathroom trips or when I’d tuck myself away in my writing closet to continue hacking away at my various writing projects once everyone had either left for the night (my sister’s partner and her friend were both staying at a nearby hotel) or otherwise gone to sleep, but it was also nice to have people to talk to. I’m definitely ready for a weekend to myself, though, especially knowing I’ve got some pre-planned social activities to help prevent me from getting too lonely and melancholic (both of which are tabletop games).
Continue readingConsenting To Being A Part Of A Digital System
I’ve been thinking about the various systems of the world around me, mostly digital, and my place in them. For instance, under a different name (a username), I’m one of Google’s top 10% of reviewers for pretty much every major category they track. I have achieved this mostly by writing clear, sensible, and informative reviews of three to five sentences that touch on all salient points of the business I visited. I fill out all the information I can, answer a question or two, and move on with my life. Sure, that seems like a lot, but when you consider how few places I actually go and how infrequently I actually go anywhere (unlike most of the US, I’m still actively aware that I’m living in a pandemic and avoiding any unnecessary risks in public, indoor spaces), I am writing maybe a dozen of these reviews a year. And that’s enough to get me into the top ten percent. In a completely different direction, I went back to a pizza place for the first time in many months and then got eight emails form the business (with no repeats) in the next twenty-four hours. I got more junk email from them than I got for Black Friday sales in the same time period. It was intense and unnerving. Made me want to never go back again because they seemed to sense my return and, rather than actually offering me things, keep trying to get me to spend money on them without providing any incentive beyond the exchange of money for pizza.
Continue readingThe Drudgery Of My Job Is A Metaphor For My Life
Yesterday (well, yesterday from the day I wrote this a bit over a week and a half ago because of holiday blog displacement and me trying to bank some writing before I’m hosting people), I spent two hours turning a hefty box full of various electrical components on and off. My calculations tell me that I did it approximately eight hundred times in those two hours, using a total of four different combinations of powering up and down steps. I was trying to get it to burn out since we’ve been getting reports of issues in the field with this particular box of electronics burning itself out when users are turning it on in the morning. While this did not make a lot of sense to us, given how hard we hit these things in the lab during the course of developing them and then testing them, we figured it was worth looking into. By which I mean the engineers and my manager figured it was worth looking into and the other testers figured it was worth me testing because, now that my urgent project is done, I don’t have anything that needs to be done yesterday while all the other testers are still working on that schedule.
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